Anyone who’s read much about Daesh knows who created the monster and who is the Frankenstein in that particular horror show. Imagine thinking to avenge September 11, 2001 on Iraq, and in the process – despite ridding the world of Saddam Hussein – …

László Krasznahorkai is one of those big-time contemporary talents for whom mighty claims are made. Early on, both Sontag and Sebald compared him to Gogol, that most romantic and cartoonish of 19th-century realists in whose work haunted and unearthly …

When Alan Hollinghurst burst upon the literary world 30-odd years ago with The Swimming-Pool Library he looked like a major talent in search of a minor subject matter. Or was it wrong to say that here was a high comedian of fiction in the manner …

Karl Ove Knausgaard is the writer since Roberto Bolaño and David Foster Wallace, both alas dead mid-career, for whom the highest claims are made internationally. His multi-volume My Struggle saga asks to be taken as seriously as a work of fiction …

Every so often someone writes fiction that ravishes the popular imagination. Robert Drewe did it at the outset with The Bodysurfers in 1983 and Christos Tsiolkas has been doing it in his latest books. Now Drewe has done it again in Whipbird, …

It’s amazing the airs trash fiction gives itself these days. The latest effort by Michael Robotham exploits the neat unstartling idea of a woman who works in a supermarket who steals a newborn baby of a posh woman she befriends. It has plenty of tension …

Hinterland is one of those big Australian bush novels in which a group of people – some of them sick, some of them rich and vicious, some of them vassals of the rich or put-upon kids – all collide in a big quasi-political story of grand themes …

Bob Dylan sang, “You’ve been through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books/you’re very well read, it’s well known” about someone who knew something was happening but didn’t know what it was. Was that like Fitzgerald? Pretty early on he started …

It’s an intrepid novelist who goes into the house of Atreus as an adjunct of the house of fiction but that’s what Colm Tóibín has done. The man who took on the voice of Henry James in The Master has written a contemporary novel about the …